All across Manitoba on Friday, teachers came together in about 28 different Special Area Groups for an full day of professional development workshops. I was invited by EBIT (Educators of Business and Information Technology) to do a presentation. Mine was the host school and the organizer of the conference is a friend so I said yes.

The idea was to a have more of a conversation than a presentation, where everyone came with a lesson plan they thought they might like to rework to take advantage of the affordances offered by social media and the suite of free tools available online. I shared a number of examples of how I had done this with some of my own lessons.

About 45 minutes into the workshop people started warming up and we had some good discussion. I tried to keep the focus more on pedagogy than tools but that can be hard in a session like this. Judging from the feedback afterward I think folks walked away happy for having been there. I created a wiki as a reference point for the folks that were there.

One of the examples that captured people's imagination was the mapping project my son is working on. It's not done yet, so I guess I'm outing him early. Many people seemed tickled at the idea that they could leave him an encouraging comment on his Google Map where he's bringing together text, images, and video to give an overview of the book Underground to Canada by Barbara Smucker. Remember, what he's got there right now is mostly a partial rough draft, he should have it done in about another 7-10 days. In the meantime, feel free to leave some positive comments or suggestions for him on his map. ;-)

Here are the slides and audio from the session, available here and there. A comprehensive list of links we referenced should be there by the end of the weekend.

Extreme (Web 2.0) Lesson Plan Makeover

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: teaching pedagogy)

Audio (1 hr 41 min 25 sec)


Fast forward through the boring bits.

Our provincial professional development day (with the most unfortunate name: SAG (Special Area Groups)) is coming in about two weeks, on November 23. Clarence, Chris and I we're talking:

"Hey, Clarence will be in town. Why don't we go for lunch, maybe a drink, and spend some time catching up?"

"Yeah, good idea. I like that."

"Hey, maybe we could start a homegrown Manitoba EduBloggerCon. We'll just throw up a wiki, publish about it on our blogs, maybe there'll be five or six of us who can all get together for lunch."

So, Clarence throws up a wiki and we wait to see what happens. (In spite of the url typo, there will be no nasal effluvium involved ... but there will be beer.)

To make a long story short, Andy McKiel, the President Elect of ManACE signed up first and generously offered to host what is turning out to be a much bigger event.

John Evans, Chris, Clarence and I will give 6 minute (6 is my favourite number) unconference-like talks about what we're up to vis-a vis teaching and technology. There will be an open mic so anyone is welcome to do the same. We'll have a projector and screen with wireless and might even have a SMARTBoard set up running twittercamp. Dean Shareski (who will be attending another conference in Winnipeg that week) will be there too giving it a broader "Prairie Province feel." We might even have a Ustream feed.

As of last week we had over 40 people signed up (not all are registered via the wiki) and Andy has put together the flyer you see below. I think twittercamp is a definite go. Ustream is still in the discussion phase but we all like the idea.

If you are in or around Winnipeg on the night of November 22 drop in and say hello. We'd all love to see you there. ;-)

[Just experimenting here, I uploaded the doc to my new scribd.com account to see how it all works. It has a great many more cool features than just hosting jpeg files.]